Lives & Letters Mailing: December 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
New Trace: Letters by Njube son of Lobengula
New Trace: A letter and three lists: Hawksley to Rhodes
Blogs on Whiteness and Not-seeing
Blog on The Rhodes Papers – Trip to Bodleian Library, Oxford
2. New Book: Sewing, Fighting and Writing by Maria Tamboukou
3. Upcoming Events: The Production and Experience of Archives
4. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38.3 (Summer 2015)
5. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1, Winter 2016
6. Call For Papers: 3rd International Irish Narrative Inquiry Conference
7. Translating Memory and Remembrance Across the Disciplines
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
To mark the end of 2015, there are some new items of project news we would like to share with Lives and Letters readers:
New Trace: Letters by Njube son of Lobengula
This trace concerns detailed extracts from four letters from Njube Lobengula, son of the last Ndebele King, to Rhodes. These are among the latter’s personal papers. The extracts from each letter are verbatim, and there is a detailed discussion of each in terms of the stratagems used. To find out more, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/lettersbynjube/
New Trace: A letter and three lists: Hawksley to Rhodes
This trace concerns the relationship between a letter and some lists, and consequently where the boundaries of epistolarity and epistolary intent are. The example discussed is a kind of ‘covering letter’ from Hawksley, Rhodes’ solicitor, accompanied by three linked lists. These items also raise interesting matters concerning Rhodes’s finances and wealth. To read more, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/a-letter-and-three-lists/
Not-seeing
There are silences and absences in letters, which are often very telling. Drawing on Coetzee (1988) such things as the failure in South African white letter-writing to ‘see’ all the black people around them raise important issues. Is this knowing but not saying? Or is more going on, in the form of a transmutation of what is before people’s eyes? This is discussed via examples, including a praise letter to Rhodes by the by the doctor and missionary Jane Waterson. To read more on the oddities of whiteness, please see the following blog posts: (1) http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/not-seeing-and-whiteness/
(2) http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/a-wicked-perversion-the-other-whiteness/
The Rhodes Papers – Trip to Bodleian Library, Oxford
Liz Stanley and Sue Wise have just spent nearly a month of focused intensive work on the Rhodes Papers in the Bodleian library manuscript collections in Oxford. Please visit the blog to read some summative thoughts: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-rhodes-papers-summary-thoughts/
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2. New Book: Sewing, Fighting and Writing by Maria Tamboukou
Sewing, Fighting and Writing
Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture
By Maria Tamboukou
“What riches lie within Maria Tamboukou’s wonderful Sewing, Writing and Fighting. She provides an analytically outstanding feminist genealogy of the submerged histories of some fascinating women, who were socialist revolutionaries, unionised workers, militant feminists, thinkers and writers as well as seamstresses, in a way that is both engaging and thought- provoking.” – Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh
“This highly original, richly theorised account draws us into the storyworlds of revolutionary seamstresses who struggled for recognition of the importance of women’s work. Maria Tamboukou’s meticulous scholarship brings a sense of personal connection, respect and reverence to her philosophical reflections on gendered power relations and the importance of association.” – Marty Grace, Victoria University
Nov 2015 | HB £75.00/$115.00 9781783482443 | PB £24.95 /$37.95 9781783482450 | eBook £24.95 /$36.99 9781783482467
Paris, along with New York, was one of the main centres of the fashion industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But while New York-based garment workers were mobilized early in the twentieth century, Paris was the stage of vibrant revolutions and uprisings throughout the nineteenth century. As a consequence, French women workers were radicalized much earlier, creating a unique and unprecedented moment in both labour and feminist history. Seamstresses were central figures in the socio-political and cultural events of nineteenth and early twentieth century France, yet their stories and political writings have so far remained marginalized and obscured.
Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished documents from the industrial revolution, Sewing, Fighting and Writing is a Foucauldian genealogy of the Parisian seamstress. Looking at the assemblage of radical practices in work, politics and culture, it explores the constitution of the self of the seamstress in the era of early industrialization and revolutionary events and considers her contribution to the socio-political and cultural formations in modernity.
Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies, co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and co-editor of the journal Gender and Education.
Contents: Introduction: Charting lines of light: the Parisian seamstress / 1. Adventures in a culture of thought: genealogies, narratives, process / 2. Mapping the archive: mnemonic and imaginary technologies of the self / 3. ‘From my work you will know my name’: materialising utopias / 4. Feeling the world: love, gender and agonistic politics / 5. Living, writing and imagining the revolution / 6. Creativity as process: writing the self, rewriting history / Conclusion: Reassembling radical practices
For deliveries to North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Latin America www.rowman.com
For deliveries to the UK and rest of the world www.rowmaninternational.com
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3. Upcoming Events: The Production and Experience of Archives
The following events at the IHR may be of interest to members of the
list:
Institute of Historical Research Winter Conference and Gerald Aylmer
Seminar 2016: The Production and Experience of Archives
The National Archives, the Institute of Historical Research and the
Royal Historical Society have organised two events in 2016 which will
bring together historians, archivists and scholars from other
disciplines to explore the nature of archives.
The first event is the Institute of Historical Research Winter
Conference, and the second is the Gerald Aylmer Seminar. These are both
annual events, but this year they have been planned as a pair and will
deal with the production and experience of archives respectively.
Institute of Historical Research Winter Conference: The Production of
the Archive (29 January 2016)
The first event will consider how and by whom archives are produced. How
is the agency of the archivist changing in a digital world? In what ways
can historians be seen to co-create archives in the course of their
research?
The day will include a keynote by archival science scholar Professor
Eric Ketelaar (University of Amsterdam) and three sessions on Text, Text
to Digital and Beyond Text, in which speakers will present their
reflections and engage in discussion. Finally there will be a round
table featuring Jeff James, Chief Executive and Keeper of The National
Archives.
Visit the Institute of Historical
Research website for more details and to register for this event: http://winterconference.history.ac.uk/.
Gerald Aylmer Seminar: The Experience of the Archive (29 April 2016)
The second event will focus on the questions that surround the
individual, personal and community experience of the archive, and the
ways in which that experience affects how the archive is understood and
used. The keynote will be given by historian Professor Carolyn Steedman
(University of Warwick).
This event will take place at the Institute of Historical Research.
Registration is not yet open, but keep the date in your diary if you
would like to attend.
…brought to you by HPS-discussion.
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4. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38.3 (Summer 2015)
Available on Project Muse or from University of Hawaiʻi Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Articles
Edward Saunders, “Defining Metabiography in Historical Perspective: Between Biomyths and Documentary,” 325–342
There is a certain degree of confusion regarding the term “metabiography,” which has been used to refer to both comparative historiographical studies and postmodern narratives. While metabiography may come of age with postmodernism, its concerns with self-consciousness and fictionality are at once older and more universal.
Dmitri Kalugin, “Soviet Theories of Biography and the Aesthetics of Personality” 343–362
This article considers the history of Russian thinking on the genre of biography, focusing on the Romantic and post-Romantic intellectual tradition that grants to the biographical subject the power to craft one’s own self. This tradition can still be found to be operative in the work of Yuri Lotman and Lydia Ginzburg.
Ioana Luca, “Secret Police Files, Tangled Life Narratives: The 1.5 Generation of Communist Surveillance,” 363–394
The opening of the archives in the former Eastern European bloc has led to heated political debates in the ex-communist countries, lustration, and the reassessment of the Cold War experience, both east and west. This essay focuses on the significance of accessing the secret police files in life writing produced by the 1.5 generation of communist surveillance. I read Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People to consider what happens to communist life narratives of an oppressive state apparatus when taken up by children of communist dissidents, how transnational identities and life stories emerging from post-Cold War Eastern Europe impact the genre, and what the implications of this new autobiographical form are for life writing from and about Eastern Europe within the post-communist and global contexts. By mapping the range of relationships between such autobiographical writing and the secret police files it incorporates, I show the numerous changes life narratives undergo in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, illustrate the ever increasing complexity of life writing in global contexts, and point to new routes of memory with regard to communist oppression.
Cynthia G. Franklin, “The Afterlife of the Text: Launching ‘Life in Occupied Palestine,’” 395–424
This essay describes how, through launching the Biography issue “Life in Occupied Palestine” in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors’ stories took on a life and generated stories of their own—ones that, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.
Reviews
A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson, by Nicholas Hudson, and Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, edited by Howard D. Weinbrot
Reviewed by Robert G. Walker, 426–435
Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, by Catherine Zuromskis
Reviewed by Sarah Evans, 436–438
Embodied Narratives: Connecting Stories, Bodies, Cultures and Ecologies, edited by Laura Formenti, Linden West, and Marianne Horsdal
Reviewed by Amir Marvasti, 438–441
The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun: An Early Modern Biography, by Sonia Pérez-Villanueva
Reviewed by Benito Quintana, 441–444
Autobiography in Black and Brown: Ethnic Identity in Richard Wright, and Richard Rodriguez, by Michael Nieto Garcia
Reviewed by Frederick Luis Aldama, 444–449
Biographie & Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration, edited by Olivier Ferret and Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre
Reviewed by Joanny Moulin 450–452
The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time, by Anne Freadman
Reviewed by Catherine Slawy-Sutton, 453–457
Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies, by Patricia A. Lange
Reviewed by Carolyn M. Cunningham 457–460
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1, Winter 2016
The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are pleased to announce the publication of issue 31.1, Winter 2016.
Table of Contents
Foreword: The Hogan Prize
Essay Cluster: Biofictions
Guest Editor: Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota, Morris
Introduction: Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota, Morris
The Process
Going for the Subjective: One Way to Write Biographical Fiction
Barbara Mujica, Georgetown University
Biographical fiction is necessarily subjective, as since authors must filter their protagonist’s experience through their own. In my own novels—Frida, Sister Teresa, I Am Venus—I incorporate the unavoidable subjectivity of biographical fiction into the story through the creation of unreliable narrators who force the reader to question the authenticity of the text.
Writing Biographical Fiction: Some Personal Reflections
Jay Parini, Middlebury College
Jay Parini, author of three biographies and three biographical novels, reflects on the different strategies and approaches to both genres, clarifies the different kinds of “truths” each pictures, discusses the kind of ethical responsibilities authors have to their subject, and considers shifts in our understanding of history in relation to the rise of biofiction.
On Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Fictional Portraiture
Joanna Scott, University of Rochester
From its origins, fiction has made a paradoxical claim on readers, presenting its inventions as actual history. In particular, biographical fiction often blurs the boundary between verifiable fact and its imagined material. Like an expertly executed hoax, a strong fictional portrait that borrows from history invites fascination with its uncanny reality.
Essays
The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel
Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota, Morris
The biographical novel has supplanted the classical historical novel. What has caused this is a shift in our contemporary theories of consciousness, which radically impact the way we understand and do history. Traditional historical novelists have a positivist approach to history, so they picture the external factors that objectively shape and determine consciousness and, thereby, make historical collisions possible. Biographical novelists believe that there is a surreal dimension to consciousness, so they shift the focus from the objective external world to the subjective internal world in order to picture the forces that have given birth to major historical collisions.
The President’s Glands: Somatic Interiority and the Referents of Biographical Fiction in American Adulterer
Catherine Belling, Northwestern University
In the biographical novel American Adulterer, physician Jed Mercurio recounts President Kennedy’s life as the story of a sick body. This experiment and its reception expose biofiction’s conventional assumptions regarding human interiority and reveals alternative, bodily, interiors, knowable largely through medical discourse, that work as the biographical novel’s biological referents.
The Notable Woman in Fiction: Novelistic Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Julia Novak, University of Vienna
Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biographical fiction, this paper examines fictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Carola Oman’s Miss Barrett’s Elopement (1930) to Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008). Focusing on their depiction of her profession, the novels are read as part of the poet’s afterlife and reception history.
General Essays
Life before “The New Biography”: Modernist Biographical Methods in The Hogarth Press “Books on Tolstoi” 1920–24
Claire Battershill, University of Reading
In the early 1920s, before Virginia Woolf wrote her now well-known essays “The New Biography” and “The Art of Biography,” the Hogarth Press published four biographies of Tolstoy. Each of these English translations of Russian works takes a different approach to biographical composition, and as a group they offer multiple and contradictory perspectives on Tolstoy’s character and on the genre of biography in the early twentieth century. These works show that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press took a multi-perspectival, modernist approach to publishing literary lives.
David Shields’s Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or Beyond the Paradox
Arnaud Schmitt, Université Bordeaux Montaigne
In 2010, David Shields published Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a text in which he makes the case for memoirs against the more classical forms of autobiography, arguing notably that you can write only one autobiography while you can write multiple memoirs, “though coming at your life from different angles.” He echoes Doubrovksy’s original definition of autofiction (circa 1977), a concept meant to allow autobiographical writings to enter the postmodern era, unburdened by the readers’ referential expectations Then, in 2013, Shields published what can be seen as a case study, a work matching the criteria presented in Reality Hunger. Indeed, How Literature Saved my Life purports to be both “confessional criticism” and “anthropological autobiography.” Does the case study live up to the theory? Does Shields’s own memoir overcome the obvious limits of the French autofiction and shed a new light on the process of remembering one’s life? And above all, is it really possible, as suggested by Shields, to jettison the referential issue and move beyond the classical frames of autobiography and fiction?
Make a Black Life, and Bid It Sing: Sacred Song in the 1816 Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea
John Saillant, Western Michigan University
Obscure for 170 years after its 1816 publication, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher flashed like a meteor in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century scholarship on black life and letters. Jea’s only other work, published at the same time by the same printer, A Collection of Hymns . . . Compiled and Selected by John Jea, African Preacher of the Gospel, has never been examined in scholarship. Now is the time, three decades after the rediscovery of the Life, for a reexamination of Jea’s memoir of his birth in West Africa, slavery and manumission in New York, life as a sailor, and finally, middle age in Portsea, England. A fresh analysis should take into account Jea’s hymnbook. The two volumes were intertwined both by the circumstances of their publication and by Jea’s inclusion of hymns in the Life.
Book Reviews
Rev. of Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. By Mary K. DeShazer. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2013. 239 pp.
Bethany Ober Mannon, Pennsylvania State University
Review essay: “Approaches to (Auto-)biography from History, Sociology, Media and Literary Studies in Two German Publications”
Anita Wohlmann, Johannes Gutenberg University
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Ricia Anne Chansky, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
www.tandfonline.com/raut
https://www.amazon.com/author/riciachansky
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. 5th Great War in Africa Association and 3rd International Network for the Study of the Great War in Africa
Venue: The National Archives, Kew, London
Dates: 3 and 4 May 2016
Deadline for Call for Papers submission: 31 January 2016
1916 was a significant year in the Great War. In Europe it was the year of the Somme and Gallipoli. In Africa it was the year of Salaita and the British allied invasion into German East Africa, the loss of Cameroon to the Allies and the subsequent use of West African forces in East Africa. South African forces detoured via Egypt en route to the Somme and in Ethiopia Menelik was deposed. It therefore seems fitting to explore how those living in Africa experienced the war, both in their own land and elsewhere.
Papers, presentations and posters are sought from all scholars (academic and other) around the following themes:
▪ Military
▪ Economic
▪ Medical
▪ Impact of the war
▪ Social and cultural – the fighting and ‘home’ fronts
Abstracts and proposals of up to 300 words as well as a short biography should be sent to: greatwarinafrica2014@gmail.com. This email should also be used for any enquiries related to the conference.
Poster submissions must be in English. They should include a 1 page abstract and a draft of the final poster. Please prepare your poster in either portrait or landscape format with the following dimensions: 82cm x 102cm.
Conference fee for the two days: £70 (£35 for one)
The conference is taking place on the Tuesday and Wednedsay following a Bank Holiday. It is therefore advised that accommodation bookings are made early.
Airbnb.co.uk in Kew, Richmond, Twickenham, Chiswick and Ealing are relatively local and could be cheaper than hotels and B&Bs.
Conference venue: The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU.
Organising Committee:
Anne Samson, Great War in Africa Association http://gweaa.com
Ana Paula Pires, IHC-FCSH-UNL, International Network for the Study of the Great War in Africa
Dan Gilfoyle
Contact Email: greatwarinafrica2014@gmail.com
URL: http://gweaa.com/the-5th-great-war-in-africa-conference-34-may-2016/
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Translating Memory and Remembrance Across the Disciplines
Conference dates: MARCH 11-12, 2016
Venue: SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY
Translating Memory and Remembrance Across the Disciplines, a year-long conference and workshop sponsored by SUNY’s Conversation in the Disciplines program, seeks to bring together scholars and artists from across disciplines and institutions to generate collaborations, foment new queries, discover new methodologies, and build institutional bridges among scholars of memory, forgetting, and commemoration. Join us for the second and final installment of this conference and workshop.
Session II – March 11-12, 2016
KEYNOTE: Salamishah Tillet, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Department of English, Department of Africana Studies, and Core Teaching and Faculty member of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Topics might include but are not limited to:
How are we approaching the study of memory? What disciplinary limitations and methodological challenges do we face? What are the opportunities and limitations presented by studying memory from interdisciplinary perspectives?
How does memory get disciplined through institutional (academic, bureaucratic, archival) apparatuses?
How do gender and sexuality transform our understanding of memory and how are gendered practices determined by remembrance or erasure?
How can critical race scholarship shed light on what’s remembered and forgotten, by whom, and to what ends? How does memory become a practice of resistance and affirmation for underrepresented groups?
How do educational materials and processes (textbooks, standardized exams, standardized curricula) facilitate or obstruct remembering and forgetting?
What is the place of memory in discussions about collective action and social change? In what ways is memory a place for political struggle?
How do trauma and censorship (subjective and institutional) define people’s understanding of reality?
How does art become a place of, and provide a language for, practices of remembrance and forgetting, voicing and silence?
Format
The conference will consist of two formats: Themed Panels and Workshops
In the themed panels, participants will give a 15-minute presentation of their work.
In the workshops, participants will present research in progress to receive feedback and generate dialogues with other projects from a variety of approaches to memory studies. These workshops will provide an overview of the range of methods, questions, and literatures for scholars of memory studies.
We invite and welcome submissions by both scholars and artists.
Scholars should submit abstracts of completed projects (for panel presentations) as well as works in progress (for workshops). All submissions should be 250-300 words, must identify the format of interest (panel or workshop), include the name(s) of the author(s) and the title of the project.
Artists should submit a one-page artist statement and 10 images of the work(s) on which their presentation will be focused.
Please send submissions to translatingmemory@gmail.com by January 15th, 2016.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 6 January 2016
